The F.B.I. received a tip last month from someone close to Nikolas Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed Friday, but it acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.
The tipster, who called an F.B.I. hotline on Jan. 5, told the bureau that Mr. Cruz had a “desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts,” the F.B.I. said.
.. The tip about Mr. Cruz appeared to be the second in four months, after another person told the bureau about online comments from Mr. Cruz that he wanted to become “a professional school shooter.”
.. The F.B.I.’s admission opened up a new avenue of attack by conservatives who have questioned the impartiality of the bureau in its investigation into Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
“Last September, FBI was sent a screenshot of a comment by nikolas cruz,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said in a post on Twitter. “Unfortunately, the FBI was busy running down Clinton campaign leads about a nonexistent Russian conspiracy with Trump.”
.. After those incidents, F.B.I. investigators compared themselves to hockey goalies, fielding a relentless barrage of pucks. Sometimes, they said, they could not keep things from making the net.
.. The F.B.I. was not the only law enforcement agency to be warned about Mr. Cruz. Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County said Friday that his office had received about 20 calls regarding the suspected school gunman over the past few years.
.. The earliest known tip to the bureau came from a bail bondsman in Mississippi who told the F.B.I. last September about a worrying comment left on his YouTube channel from a “nikolas cruz” saying, “Im going to be a professional school shooter.”
.. Agents from the F.B.I. field office in Jackson, Miss., looked into the comment but could not identify who had posted it
.. The criticism of the F.B.I. has only increased after Mr. Mueller began to ensnare associates of Mr. Trump, including Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, and Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser.
.. All over the world, people make threats similar to those by Nikolas Cruz. Only in America is it possible to act on those threats so easily.
.. -They could possibly have discovered that he was the person who posted the threatening messages on YouTube. People who publicly state an intention to harm others can be charged.
FBI Director Defends Handling of Background Check of Former Trump Aide
The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said his agency first flagged issues with its background check of Rob Porter to the administration in March, a timeline that conflicts with what the White House said it knew about the former aide’s past.
.. Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that the FBI last year gave multiple updates to the White House on its findings about Mr. Porter. After sharing a partial report on Mr. Porter in March, the FBI provided its completed background check on Mr. Porter to the White House in July, Mr. Wray said.
.. Last fall, White House counsel Don McGahn told Mr. Kelly there was “an issue” involving Mr. Porter’s clearance, according to an administration official, who said Mr. McGahn didn’t provide many details. Mr. Kelly was surprised to learn that Mr. Porter, 40, had been married before.
The chief of staff, a retired four-star general, also expressed dissatisfaction about the number of White House aides who were operating under interim security clearances. “His view was, ’We would never have this at the Pentagon,” the official said.
Donald Trump: Middle-American Radical
Trump, he writes, “would more accurately be described as a ‘radical anti-progressive’” who is “at war with the progressives who have co-opted American civil society.” Moreover, Trump “is willing to go further than any other previous conservative to defeat them.”
.. “Radical anti-progressives” recognize that many institutions—the academy, media, entertainment, and the courts—have been co-opted and corrupted by the left. And as these institutions are not what they once were, they no longer deserve the respect they once had.
.. Trump sees many institutions as fortresses lately captured by radical progressives that must be attacked and besieged if they are to be recaptured and liberated. Cannon deals with three such politicized institutions: the media, the NFL, and the courts.
.. Trump does not attack freedom of the press but rather the moral authority and legitimacy of co-opted media institutions. It is what CNN has become, not what CNN was, that Trump disrespects.
.. These people are political enemies posturing as journalists who create “fake news” to destroy me
.. Before 2016, the NFL was an untouchable. When
- the league demanded that North Carolina accept the radical transgender agenda or face NFL sanctions, the Tar Heel State capitulated. When
- Arizona declined to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday in 1990, the NFL took away the Super Bowl. The Sun State caved
.. Trump delivered a full-throated defense of the flag and called for kicking the kneelers off the field, out of the game, and off the team.
“Fire them!” Trump bellowed.
.. Before Trump, the FBI was sacrosanct. But Trump savaged an insiders’ cabal at the top of the FBI that he saw as having plotted to defeat him.
.. Trump has not attacked an independent judiciary, but courts like the Ninth Circuit, controlled by progressives and abusing their offices to advance progressive goals
.. it let the Supreme Court seize its power over social policy and convert itself into a judicial dictatorship.
.. Trump instead seeks to fight and delegitimize any institution the Left has captured, and rebuild it from the ground up.”
.. Trump supporters who most relish the wars he is waging are the “Middle American Radicals,”
.. After World War II, as it became clear that our long-ruling liberal elites had blundered horribly in trusting Stalin, patriots arose to cleanse our institutions of treason and its fellow travelers.
.. The Hollywood Ten were exposed and went to jail. Nixon nailed Alger Hiss. Truman used the Smith Act to shut down Stalin’s subsidiary, the Communist Party USA. Spies in the atom bomb program were run down. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair.
.. Liberals call it the “Red Scare.” They are right to do so.
For when the patriots of the Greatest Generation like Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy came home from the war and went after them, the nation’s Reds had never been so scared in their entire lives.
Trump’s Tool Kit Does Not Include the Constitution
a survey of 2000 voters that shows public faith in 27 key democratic principles — ranging from the independence of the judiciary to constitutional limits on executive power — has declined across the board.
.. from September 2017 to January 2018, voters’ assessments of the ability of the courts, Congress and the Constitution to “effectively check executive power dropped by 7-8 percentage points.”
.. If scholars are right that erosion proceeds on a piecemeal basis, and that the first steps often entail targeting democracy’s “referees,” then our results regarding declines in judicial independence and support for a free press are especially disturbing.
.. On Monday, he charged that Democratic members of the House and Senate were treasonous in their failure to applaud him during his State of the Union address. In a speech in Blue Ash, Ohio, Trump described how he saw it:
You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy, wild — they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country. And you have the other side, even on positive news — really positive news, like that — they were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, “treasonous.” I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?
.. Iyengar posed the following hypothetical:
Let’s assume that Mueller uncovers evidence of collusion and close associates of the Prez are implicated. Republicans are likely to deny the validity of the charges on the grounds that the investigators are biased and Republicans in Congress, as they’ve repeatedly demonstrated, will stick by Trump since the base is with him. Trump, of course, will continue with the ‘hoax’ narrative, and his surrogates in the media will be only too happy to back him up. At that point, we will have a very real threat to the rule of law.
.. Trump’s attacks on the F.B.I. are a case study in his polarization strategy. Since its founding in 1908, the F.B.I. has had substantial popular support, especially among Republicans.
.. Polarization by party identity is so powerful at the moment that most voters see the world through thick red and blue lenses. Almost everything is politicized. And, in almost every study I have run, I find that Republicans are more intense partisans than Democrats on average. We’ve seen partisanship color Republican evaluations of the FBI (negatively) and Russia and Putin (positively).
.. Trump has a negative 40-55 percent approval rating, but it’s “his best overall score in seven months.”
.. Seventy percent of voters described the economy as excellent or good, the highest since 2001
.. in politics, “what matters in the economy is real disposable income over the 6-12 months before an election.”
.. the future of democracy in America during the Trump administration depends as much or more on unemployment, take home pay, the Dow Jones industrial average, tax rates and the gross domestic product as on principled support for the rule of law.
.. as the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, continues to pursue lines of inquiry reaching deep into the White House, Trump will have plenty of opportunities in the near future to push the envelope on the rule of law.
.. I see the Democrats poised right now to make net gains of about 10 to 14 seats. They need 25 or so depending on vacancies.
.. Franklin Roosevelt’s seeking of a third (and then a fourth) term is among the most important norm violations in American political history. He hadn’t been dead for two years before both chambers of Congress proposed the 22nd amendment to limit presidents to two terms.
.. After Lincoln’s use of emergency powers to flex presidential power in ways not previously seen, Congress fought back against his successor, Andrew Johnson. More of his vetoes were overridden (15) than for any other president and Congress limited presidential influence over executive branch employment by passing the Tenure of Office Act (1867).
.. Trump won the Republican nomination and the presidency by conducting a campaign directly challenging the notion that the electorate will punish a politician for “violating accepted constitutional arrangements.”
.. If Republicans retain control of both branches of Congress in 2018 — even if by just one vote in the House and a 50-50 split (with Vice President Pence the tiebreaker) in the Senate — Trump will claim vindication. His assault on the pillars of democracy will continue unabated, with increasingly insidious effect.